Read Online The Paradise Prophecy by Robert Browne - Free Book Online

LeBlanc.
    He didn’t have cancer, but what he did have could be just as debilitating. And despite this current, rather sickening display of self-absorption, he wasn’t about to go down easy.
    He still had some fight left in him.
    He just hoped it was enough.
     
     
    B atty’s bedroom was on the second floor.
    Properly anesthetized, he stumbled to the bed and plopped onto his stomach, tucking his arms under the pillow as he lay his cheek against it.
    He was about to pass out when he felt something digging into his left forearm. Something hard and pointy, about the size of a pepper corn.
    He fumbled for it, got it between his fingers, then reached to the nightstand and turned on the light. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust, and when they did he saw that what he was holding was a diamond earring.
    But this wasn’t just any old piece of jewelry. It belonged to the woman he’d met at Bayou Bill’s last week. The one who had walked into the bar looking as if she’d just stepped out of a movie or a magazine. A redheaded, translucent-skinned wonder who had sent a stuttering spike of electricity through just about every man in the room. And Batty may well have heard angel trumpets the moment he saw her.
    He’d met his share of beautiful women over the years—Rebecca foremost among them—but none of them had prepared him for the pure sexuality that had emanated from this one. She was the kind who instantly made your groin stir and your gut ache, with a body so taut and perfectly proportioned that it should have been declared illegal in at least thirty of the fifty states.
    Batty was by no means a letch, not even close. Was not the type to sit around with the guys remarking about women’s physical attributes, pro or con. But this woman managed to bring out the beast in him the moment she walked into that bar. And he couldn’t help thinking about laying her across his bed, or on the living room couch, or atop the dining room table—hell, he didn’t care where , as long as it was sometime very soon.
    For the first time in as long as he could remember, he’d actually been able to relegate his grief over Rebecca to another part of his mind. The spell this redhead had cast was so strong that the animal came forth, begging him to take action.
    And to Batty’s surprise, he did, right here in this very house. The redhead had turned out to be more amazing than anything he could have imagined, a woman so free of inhibition, so willing to give him carte blanche to her limber little body, that he had almost felt guilty about making love to her.
    Almost.
    She was, he later realized, his anesthesia that night. An escape from the darkness that haunted him.
    Unlike the whiskey, however, she didn’t dull the senses. She heightened them. And she had returned his aggression in kind, doing things to him with her teeth and tongue and fingers that defied description. She was the most sexually adventurous creature he had ever encountered, and as he moved inside her, feeling her grip on him, her feverish flesh against his, he didn’t want her to ever let go.
    But then, when they were done, both of them slick with sweat, she surprised him even more. Had turned out to be so much more than just a willing body.
    They had spent the rest of the night talking politics and religion and history—all the things that Batty had once felt passionate about, all the things that he and Rebecca would often argue about, right here in this very bed. The conversation took so many twists and turns that he could barely remember it with any specificity now. And, unlike his brain-dead students, the redhead had listened to him with an open mind.
    And, it seemed, an open heart.
    But it was what she hadn’t done that got to him the most. When she saw the angry red scars on his wrists, the ones Edith couldn’t help staring at, the ones he refused to hide, she didn’t flinch, didn’t ask about them, didn’t judge him in any way. And later, she simply kissed